NICOLE PIERCE AND EGOART: You get
another chance to see Go Don’t Go this
weekend at Green Street Studios.

CRASHarts’ “Ten’s the Limit” was back last weekend for the seventh time, presenting eight mini-dances by eight different choreographers at the Institute for Contemporary Art. The notion of confining entries to 10 minutes seems arbitrary — why not four choreographers doing 20-minute dances? Or 10 doing six-minute dances?

These aren’t entirely rhetorical questions. Yes, “Ten’s the Limit” provides artists with exposure to an audience presumably wider than their extant friends and fans. And I imagine CRASHarts kicks in with some stipends and production support. But the time limitation stunts the growth of new players as well as established ones. With little chance to allow good ideas to develop, or embryonic ones to emerge, most of the pieces on the current series offered movement for its own sake. The dances began to blend into one aimless, giddy indulgence, and the closer, Go Don’t Go, by Nicole Pierce and EgoArt, succumbed to eye fatigue. (That work, however, can be seen again this Friday and Saturday as part of EgoArt’s full evening concert at Green Street Studios.)

Megan Schenk danced her solo a priori/memory in a tailored white ’50s dress with a big flaring skirt. Twirling and sinking, reversing directions, she seemed determined to keep herself decentered. As she was sailing back and forth along a diagonal, we heard the sound of what might have been an airplane in a steep dive. Then a piano began to play some meditative chords. Schenk stood and faced the audience, still twisting and circling her arms.

Nathan Andary used another ’50s dress — designed by Isaac Mizrahi, a black number with peekaboo cutouts in the back — for the woman who began Reciprocity or the Truth. Three other women arrived to relieve her of this outfit and dress her, like themselves, in a red semi-sheath. Then all four of them tottered and bumped around like robots trying to be fashion models.

Brian Crabtree danced with two partners, Yenkuel Chang and Joell Garfi, in Two Face Ed. Their easy stepping, pivoting, swinging movement contrasted with plinking guitars and intrusive voices by the Books. Unperturbed when the music revved up in tempo and intensity, Crabtree paired off with one of the women, then sidled up to the other.

In Kelli Edwards’s Mon Coeur, three women and two men did seem stirred by the cabaret waltzes and laments of Edith Piaf and a Piaf imitator, Jil Aigrot. I thought this dance was influenced by the playful sexiness of Twyla Tharp’s Sinatra duets from the 1980s.

Caitlin Corbett and Kelley Donovan are both capable of working in big choreographic forms, and both of them left me wanting more. Corbett assembled a diverse group of dancers and civilians, among them two men and a couple of young girls, for Tom’s Wealth: A Dance for the Masses (excerpted from a longer work). The troops streamed in and out, blended by Corbett to accommodate their differences. She used a vocabulary based in pedestrian movement, expanded selectively, so that each could take part.

I could hardly retain all the information the nine women in Donovan’s Squirm were offering. Donovan’s gift for expansive, lyrical movement looked cramped in this format, but she did harness it momentarily, with clear group designs.

Untold tales Some dances are made on specific story lines that they keep to themselves.

Sticks and bones Kelley Donovan's Borrowed Bones at the Dance Complex last weekend featured Donovan and nine accomplices in 40 minutes of intense dancing.

Ambling Tom’s Wealth: A Dance for the Masses , which premiered last weekend at the Tsai Center, is about the physical equivalent of these toys and talismans.

2009: The year in dance You could say there were two tremendous forces that propelled dance into the world of modern culture: the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev and the choreography of Merce Cunningham.

Glenn Beck's Mormon ties Thank you for carefully illustrating the intellectual dishonesty of the right wing’s number-one glory boy.

The curatorial eye Never merely illustrative, their unity seemed like the very source of Heaven.

Monuments and miniatures Harvard University’s Music Department and the Office for the Arts celebrated Leonard Bernstein’s work last weekend with “Boston to Broadway,” a festive symposium surrounded by exhibitions and concerts.

Dancing in the year of the Rat If you’re hot for Victoria’s Secret ads and addicted to Dancing with the Stars, Tango Fire will be right up your alley.

La Môme|La Vie en Rose As Piaf, Marion Cotillard is a lioness in the guise of a bird, with large, luminescent eyes that serve as windows into the singer’s troubled soul.

Requiem detexted Mozart's Requiem is one of the most controversial works in the classical repertory. Mozart had completed only parts of it and sketched other parts when he died, unexpectedly at age 35, in 1791. His death ignited immediate speculation and myth.

JOFFREY BALLET GETS ITS DUE | May 08, 2012 New York has two great ballet companies, New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater. Any other ballet troupe that wants to put down roots there has to develop a personality that's distinct from those two.

THE BOSTON BALLET’S DON QUIXOTE | May 01, 2012 In the long string of ballet productions extracted from Miguel de Cervantes's novel Don Quixote, the delusional Don has become a minor character, charging into situations where he shouldn't go and causing trouble instead of good works.